IBM and ACI Expand Partnership

IBM and ACI Worldwide announced they will significantly expand their strategic alliance to create an end-to-end solution for electronic payments powered by IBM's open technology. As part of the alliance, ACI will optimize a new generation of payment solutions on the IBM System z platform, including IBM DB2, WebSphere, and Tivoli software and Crypto-chip technology. The optimization supports the convergence of retail and wholesale payments through the use of service oriented architecture (SOA) including IBM's Payments Framework.

ACI plans to further enhance its Money Transfer System and BASE24-eps payment solutions to take advantage of IBM hardware, software and services. Meanwhile, IBM will provide ACI with technical staff and laboratory support for benchmarking and performance tuning its payments software. The companies will create a worldwide team of sales and technical specialists dedicated to selling ACI solutions on System z.

The alliance is aimed primarily at the financial services industry. According to the companies, ACI payments software running on System z provides an SOA foundation that opens up disparate payments information to be shared across the enterprise in support of multiple software applications and lines of business.